A Hedgehog and the Stars Above the Fog of Light
Can We Think Straight When We Can't See the Stars?
My father and I were hunting deer on a ranch near the Rio Grande, north of Eagle Pass and east of a little town called Quemado. Dad had decided to sit on a small hill and watch the sun rise, or, more likely, to doze a while longer. Walking the ranch was my preference, and in the first grey light of dawn I headed north from the cook shack, loafing across small hills and thorny draws.
In one of those draws I walked up on a doe resting just ahead of me in the brush. I heard her before I caught a glimpse. In that country, a surprised deer makes a distinct sound when bolting from its hideaway. It is hooves on rock and hide on stubborn scrub, but the sound is gentle somehow, more ripple than racket. I stood and listened. And then, I was blind. In an instant, a thick fog filled the draw. Sight, sound, and smell were lost to me. It was as though the deer had pulled a blanket over me as she fled so I couldn’t follow.
For a moment, sound was muffled, sight was useless, and the uniformity of the feel, smell, and taste of the fog made it imperceptible. I was senseless. You might think that would cause fear or panic, but at first I was simply awestruck that such a thing was possible. Still, being cut off from any sense of embodiment in the world, even for a short time, was disorienting. I grew confused. We forget too easily that our thoughts live in the world, need the world, race along in the world with the scampering whitetail doe we come upon by accident. Our thinking can’t help but suffer when we are deprived of it.
I was reminded of my disorientating experience a few years later when I saw Hedgehog in the Fog, a short animated film made in 1975 by the celebrated Russian animator Yuri Borisovich Norstein. So beloved is the film that there’s a statue of Hedgehog in Kyiv. (I hope it’s still there.) In the film, Hedgehog, bringing raspberry jam as a gift, is on his way to visit Bear for a night of stargazing when he comes across a thick fog. He’s adventurous, and he enters it to see what it’s like inside. Hedgehog is beguiled and alarmed in turn by various visions and experiences, some real, some imagined. Emerging, he joins Bear once again to admire the stars, visible now away from the fog. (The video is posted at the bottom of this piece. I really recommend it.)
I like to sit like Bear and Hedgehog and marvel at the stars, but these nights I’m likely to find them somewhat hidden behind a fog of artificial light that’s spreading over the globe. We’re lost in a fog of our own making. “For millennia we found our way by looking to the night sky. Today more than a third of humanity can’t see our galaxy, the Milky Way,” we’re told in a New Yorker magazine video with amateur astronomer Joe Delfausse.
If my thinking was altered while lost in a thick fog along the Texas borderland, surely I’m justified in wondering whether all of our thinking is a little confused beneath the thick fog of artificial light surrounding us on Earth.
“The patterns people see in the sky have always governed how they live on Earth, shaping ideas about time and place; power and truth; life and death,” Jo Marchant wrote in her book, The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars. “Today, as light pollution envelops our planet, the stars are almost gone…It is a catastrophic erosion of natural heritage: the obliteration of our connection with our galaxy and the wider universe.”
What becomes of our ideas “about time and place; power and truth; life and death” if the patterns they are in part based upon are no longer visible to us? Hedgehog imagined an elephant in the fog. Is that something like today’s “alternative facts?” There is plenty of evidence that a nighttime overwhelmed with artificial light damages our health, disrupts wildlife and global ecosystems, and costs our economies billions of dollars in wasted energy. I was awed by the loss of my senses in a fog, but I am overawed and frightened by the fog of light.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running with them.” Our minds run with the stars just as they race with the running deer. We need to be with them.
The good news is there are important efforts underway to turn down the lights and restore the stars to us. Each of us can do our part. My former town of Dripping Springs, just outside of Austin, was the first town in Texas to be designated an International Dark Sky Community. Folks there and around the world have taken steps to reduce light pollution, and when they do, it works. From Dripping, you can still see the Milky Way.
My old telescope is part of the “Skypark” behind the Marathon Motel in Marathon, Texas. The place is a paradise of night sky viewing. But even in our cities we can clarify our thinking by orienting ourselves beneath the stars and catching a glimpse of the wonders of the night sky now and again. Just tonight a friend in Houston remarked on the beauty of the moon. We can, it turns out, see a little through the fog of light even as we move to hit the dimmer.
A Hedgehog and the Stars Above the Fog of Light
I am so grateful for the darkness (no street lights) in our mountain town in North Carolina. Even as I sometimes struggle to see the road while driving up to our home, the glorious stars overhead make it a pleasure to slow down and enjoy the drive.